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ERIC Number: EJ1436895
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024-Sep
Pages: 13
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0165-0254
EISSN: EISSN-1464-0651
Parents' Ethnotheories of the Nature and Causes of Children's Misbehaviors: A Comparison of Mothers across Two Cultures
Ka I Ip; Jean Anne Heng; Janice Lin; Jiannong Shi; Wang Li; Sheryl Olson
International Journal of Behavioral Development, v48 n5 p385-397 2024
Across all cultures, parents have intuitive ideas ("ethnotheories") of what undesirable child characteristics are as well as how to explain them. Yet there have been relatively few cross-cultural comparisons of parents' ethnotheories about the nature and causes of child misbehavior. 108 mothers of 5-year-old children from the United States (N = 52; M[subscript age] = 5.26, SD = 0.07) and mainland China (N = 56; M[subscript age] = 5.31, SD = 0.20) were recruited to participate in a semi-structured interview that allowed parents to generate open-ended responses in relation to the nature and causes of children's misbehavior. Parents were asked to describe the behaviors they would least like to see in their children, before providing causal attributions to a series of hypothetical vignettes depicting a range of externalizing-type child behaviors. Parents' responses were coded based on common themes. Across both cultures, mothers endorsed social insensitivity as the most undesirable child characteristic. With regard to cross-cultural differences, mothers from the US highlighted aggressive and disruptive behaviors as the most salient child misbehaviors, whereas parents from mainland China emphasized cognitive and motivational difficulties. Regarding causes of child misbehaviors, American mothers were more likely than Chinese mothers to report momentary internal states as the primary causes of child misbehavior, followed by immature development. Conversely, Chinese parents attributed child misbehavior primarily to social influences, followed by temperament. Our results provide a significant contribution to our understanding on how parents across cultures define and explain misbehaviors in young children.
SAGE Publications. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320. Tel: 800-818-7243; Tel: 805-499-9774; Fax: 800-583-2665; e-mail: journals@sagepub.com; Web site: https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2993
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: United States; China
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A